How Coca-Cola İçecek is refreshing work with automation and agentic AI?

With this broad operational base, the business combines global scale with a local presence, aiming to be the best fast-moving consumer goods company across its markets. But operating across multiple countries also brought complexity. It was obvious, many core processes from finance to sales operations needed to be automated to improve efficiency as the company scaled.

CCI’s vision is to be the best FMCG company across its markets and as the Hyper Automation team, our ambition is to transform CCI into a leading hyper-automation company, directly contributing to this broader vision, explains Muhammad Junaid, Hyper Automation Product Owner at CCI. “In line with this vision, we knew we had to eliminate the manual work and AI automation was part of the answer.”

By 2019, CCI was ready to explore automation in greater depth. Initial conversations with UiPath quickly showed the potential of robotic process automation (RPA).

The first steps into automation

For Muhammad Junaid, automation marked a turning point in his career in 2019. “Everything was new for everyone, no trainings available yet. When CCI introduced RPA, UiPath Academy was the game-changer. I started with the basics and earned more than 17 certifications within six months.” That investment in skills quickly paid off. With a newly formed automation team, CCI set about finding the right proof of concept. Hackathons proved an effective way to do so, inviting employees to identify pain points and propose ideas.

We just asked people to think about their pain points. If a task was repetitive, if it was frustrating, we wanted to hear about it. The hackathons gave people excitement and ownership.

Nagihan Altunkaya Kurtoğlu • Digital Technology Product Manager at CCI.

The first process chosen was in Sales Accounting, a repetitive and high-stakes task that required daily manual intervention between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. to close sales. If the sales operating locations were not closed by that time, the next day’s sales could not start with the locations that hadn’t been closed.

“It was demanding,” Altunkaya Kurtoğlu explains. “One person had to wake up every night, without exception, and spend hours closing the sales.”

Once automated, the change was instantaneous. Instead of someone manually logging in at 1 a.m., checking each location, and closing the sales operating locations by hand, a single robot completed the same sequence automatically in just 20 minutes.

By automating the sales accounting process, CCI not only eliminated the need for night shifts but also significantly improved the quality of life for employees. It was a small automation with a big impact, a clear demonstration that bots could deliver accuracy and efficiency, leading to a better employee experience all at once.

From that point, the team moved ahead with remarkable speed and determination.

From skepticism to trust

The project, on the other hand, raised some concerns around trust in ways of working. For many employees, automation was unfamiliar territory. “In order to ease these concerns and get internal endorsement, we put the focus on the benefits of the transition such as decreasing the workload of repetitive tasks, removal of routine manual tasks with low value creation.” recalls Altunkaya Kurtoğlu.

CCI’s automation team knew those concerns couldn’t be ignored. Involving employees from the very start helped grow ownership of this new way of working among employees. “They became part of the solution” says Altunkaya Kurtoğlu and continues, “As our colleagues were gaining time back, trust began to grow.”

By 2021, the culture had shifted: employees who once feared it were now suggesting processes themselves.

AI automation at scale

As CCI’s program matured, the team began expanding beyond RPA. UiPath Action Center and UiPath Process Mining unlocked new ways to refine workflows and identify opportunities for improvement. By 2024, the next step was to integrate UiPath Document Understanding™, focusing on one of the company’s most demanding processes: Route Settlement and Auto-Billing.

After each delivery, finance staff were faced with mountains of paperwork to verify them one by one and archive them physically. From invoices to documents, everything had to be checked against SAP, the company’s core enterprise system, before being filed.

The complexity came from the three different types of shipments involved: Direct Sales Distribution, Sales Through Distributors, and Bulk to Customers. Each one created different sets of physical documents, all of which had to be processed manually and verified signatures and stamps from each document.

“The team had to work from noon through till midnight,” recalls Altunkaya Kurtoğlu. “Five people were needed every day just to keep up, and they were exhausted. Some even missed out on spending holidays with their families. It was a real concern for us.”

Automating the Route Settlement and Auto Billing process with Document Understanding changed that picture entirely. Documents were captured, classified, and validated automatically, with data filed directly into the system. “The process used to consume over a thousand hours of overtime every year,” says Altunkaya. “Now it’s zero. That’s the scale of the change.”

The automation team also invested time upfront in redesigning documents, adding structured boxes for signatures and stamps detection. This boosted accuracy to more than 97%, ensuring the robots could read and process information consistently.

Finance teams freed from the burden of route settlement, they could focus on return processing. What had previously taken four or five months to complete could now be resolved within just one month.

We always try to choose processes that have the biggest impact on people, not just the biggest financial return.

Muhammad Junaid • Hyper Automation Product Owner at CCI.

And this change didn’t go unnoticed. In 2025, CCI was recognized as a winner of the UiPath Global AI25 Awards. This was a testament to how its automation journey had grown into a people-first, enterprise-wide innovation.

Agentic AI and the future of automation

With more than 200 automations already live, CCI has built a strong foundation for the future. While finance has been the heaviest beneficiary to date, the company is now turning its focus to commercial and supply chain functions, where the scale of operations promises an even greater impact.

Altunkaya Kurtoğlu adds, “We’re now teaching ourselves and our teams about agentic AI.” The company is already piloting this next generation of digital workers, exploring how they can handle more complex, judgment-based tasks.

Looking back, both Altunkaya Kurtoğlu and Junaid offer some important advice. “Start with something simple but visible,” Junaid advises. “If you can show impact quickly, people believe in the technology."

Standardization has been another critical lesson. “If a process isn’t ready, automation will expose that very quickly,” Altunkaya Kurtoğlu explains. “We learned to review and standardize first before automating.”

And above all, engaging employees has been key. Hackathons, workshops, and training did more than surface opportunities, they built ownership and enthusiasm across the business. Altunkaya Kurtoğlu sums it up simply:

Automation is not about taking jobs. It’s about giving people space to breathe, and the opportunity to do more valuable work.

Nagihan Altunkaya Kurtoğlu • Digital Technology Product Manager at CCI.

For CCI, the journey is far from over. What began with a single bot has grown into an award-winning program spanning twelve countries. With UiPath as a partner, CCI is showing how automation can transform not only processes, but also people’s working lives, creating a more efficient and more resilient business.